Ignite Seattle 5: Big ideas and really fast talking hit Capitol Hill

If the sea of iPhones, Zunes and earbuds haven’t tipped you off, Seattle is a city of technology. It’s also a city of ideas. Talk of the giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google is at least as loud as the intrepid twenty- and thirtysomethings who debate their thoughts on work, life and the next big thing over tall Americanos in Ballard or Green Lake or Queen Anne.

Some of that buzz is coming to the Capitol Hill Arts Center tonight at Ignite Seattle 5, a hyped-up geek event that loads Seattle’s ideas into frantic five-minute PowerPoint presentations and shoots them off into a dark room stuffed with the kind of people who get a kick out of this stuff.

Highlights include “A pseudoscience guide to geek dating,” by Ryan McMinn; “Hacking elections: Getting your favorite politicians elected (legally),” by Heather Ralph; and a talk by Ellen Kowalczyk on “Living with (and not killing) the entrepreneur in your life” that I know from personal experience could come in handy for a lot of you. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the talks start at 8 p.m. Here’s a list of all18 presentations.

After going to two of these events, I’ll be giving my own talk tonight. “How to be an awesome news story commenter” was inspired by all those among you who take the time to leave the kind of thoughtful, revealing comments on seattlepi.com that make us reporters open our minds, rethink our strategies and do our jobs better.